The heart and soul of any city, but especially New York because it is so large and populous, are its public spaces - that is, the spaces created, owned and enjoyed by all. Everything else, of course, is private property, and access to and use of it are forbidden to everyone but its owners and their guests.

There are all kinds of public spaces in New York, and all of them are under fierce and sustained attack these days: the parks (closings, curfews and surveillance cameras); the streets (pedestrian barricades, tickets for jaywalking and the demonization of bicycle riders); the lamp-posts and walls (posters and handbills are "graffiti" and are therefore prohibited); the sidewalks (harassment and arrest of artists selling their work); the subway stations (harassment and arrest of buskers); etc., etc., ad nauseam. Lumped together, these attacks on the free use of public space are called "the quality of life campaign" by the crypto-fascist Republican mayor with national political aspirations, Rudolph Giuliani.

But by far the most insidious attacks are being mounted against those properties owned by the City of New York and administered by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD): abandoned buildings, and abandoned and empty lots. Since most of these properties have been on the city rolls for many years, there has been sufficient time for local activists to band together and collectively transform the empty and sealed buildings into homesteads (or "squats") and the empty and garbage-strewn lots into community gardens. These transformations are of relevance for radical environmentalists everywhere, for they show that it is possible for relatively large numbers of people in American cities to rediscover and maintain a direct connection with the Earth.

Today there are approximately 750 community gardens in New York City; nearly 85 are located in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The oldest of New York's surviving community gardens were created in the mid-1970s, which was when HPD began amassing a huge portfolio of unused real estate as a result of economic recession, "urban blight" and "white flight" to the suburbs, arson, forfeiture and abandonment. Rather than allowing these "warehoused" properties to remain either totally unused or used only by drug dealers, addicts, prostitutes and trash dumpers, pioneers such as Adam Purple and "the Purple People," creators of the now legendary "Garden of Eden," used direct action to get the goods in spectacularly neglected areas like Harlem, the South Bronx, Staten Island, Brooklyn and the Lower East Side.

In 1984, one year before the city destroyed it to make room for low-income housing, the Garden of Eden, a huge circle in whose center spun a yin-yang symbol, encompassed five city lots in the Lower East Side, included 45 fruit and nut trees and was featured in National Geographic. It attracted tourists from all over the world. Adam Purple himself was, and still is, no less formidable: Until his eviction in March 1998, he lived as a squatter in a neighboring abandoned building, without such "necessities" as gas, electricity and running water for almost 20 years. Ted Kaczynski (minus the bombs) in the middle of Manhattan, Adam Purple has done more to undermine the foundations of modern, technological capitalism than the Unabomber ever could.

In the 1980s, a crucial deal was brokered between HPD and the community board of the Lower East Side. Under this agreement, the city allowed non-profit groups to develop abandoned and HPD-administered buildings in the Lower East Side for use as low- and moderate-income housing units. In exchange, HPD won rights to expeditiously sell off all of its vacant lots in the Lower East Side and to allow construction of housing units upon them.

Under this plan, 80 percent of all new housing units were to be rented at "market-rates," while the remaining 20 percent was to be rented at subsidized prices affordable by low-income individuals and families. "The aim," Robert Fitch wrote in The Assassination of New York , "is to get rid of large numbers of poor people and replace them with smaller numbers of middle class people." A handful of wealthy people raises the city's tax base higher than a much larger group of poor people; the wealthy require fewer subsidized social services than the poor; and a few yuppie scum are far less likely to riot, burn and loot than a mass of the working poor.

Because so many of the lots that the city thought to be "empty" were in fact community gardens, this plan marked the beginning of the intense battles over the gardens currently being waged.

With the 1992 election of Rudolph Giuliani, New York's first Republican mayor in many years, a great deal changed quickly in the city. A very cozy relationship developed between HPD and the New York City Housing Partnership, a subsidiary of the New York City Partnership. (Founded by David Rockefeller in 1982, the NYC Partnership absorbed the City's Chamber of Commerce in the late 1980s and is now one of the city's most powerful nongovernmental organizations.)

After ten years of activity in greater New York City, the Housing Partnership began to turn its rapacious attention upon the Lower East Side. In late 1996, it proposed a project called Del Este Village (The East Village in Spanglish). Del Este Village calls for the construction of nine different four-story condominiums in a tiny area of the Lower East Side. To build these nine condos, a total of seven community gardens will have to be destroyed.

In response to this threat, a number of small but very committed activist groups were formed. Radical gardeners from the Lower East Side's not-for-profit Earth Celebrations group joined with gardeners from all over the city to form the NYC Coalition for the Preservation of the Gardens, which hired attorneys and pursued challenges to Del Este Village in court. Activists from a variety of progressive social movements came together to form the Lower East Side Coalition (LESC), which includes sub-groups focused upon the related issues of community gardens and affordable housing. While the Preservation Coalition fought in the courts, the LESC used wheatpasting, tabling and standing on street corners to distribute information.

The LESC also used the names and addresses it collected on its sign-up sheets to generate the list of garden activists with access to a modem and computer that later came to be known as the E-Mail Army. When sent the word to go into action, the E-Mail Army, numbering nearly 140 people, gets on their telephones and fax machines and inundates a set of targets (city bureaucrats and politicians) with messages about saving the community gardens from destruction. The "fax jam," sending the same message over and over again to a single fax machine and using really large letters so that each individual message takes up as many pages as possible, became a specialty. It was such a successful technique that the organizer of the E-Mail Army was arrested in October 1997 for "harassment."

During this period, the Chico Mendez Mural Garden was sealed, barricaded and re-named "Fort Chico Mendez." Established in 1992, the Chico Mendez was a most unusual community garden. Not only was it named (somewhat inaccurately) for the murdered Brazilian rainforest activist Chico Mendes, it was also surrounded by a truly exquisite and varied collection of spray-painted graffiti and hand-painted murals.

All of these efforts forestalled the destruction of four of the seven community gardens threatened by Del Este Village until December 30, 1997. The real estate developer who was allowed to steal the four community gardens for a total of $39,000 and who is a generous donor to the coffers of Rudy Giuliani (so much so that he was forced to return several thousand dollars) was present at the destruction of the Chico Mendez. Donald Capoccia is a great opponent as he is a great figure of urban evil: He lives in the very neighborhood he is ruining in a building intended to be rented to low-income individuals and families, an arrangement brought about by the building's project manager, one Donald Capoccia!

Ever since December 30, 1997, the Fort Sumpter of the garden movement, important events have been happening with increasing frequency. On New Year's Day, two garden activists penetrated the Mayor's closed-to-the-public inauguration and unfurled a banner that read, "Save the Gardens," while chanting "Giuliani whacked the gardens!" On January 5, 1998, nearly 100 protesters rallied in front of the offices of the New York City Partnership; four chained themselves together and succeeded in totally snarling downtown traffic for over an hour. On February 20, Donald Capoccia served a garden activist with a $2 million defamation of character lawsuit. (The suit was quickly dropped.) On February 23, Capoccia had one of the Chico Mendez gardeners arrested for "trespassing" on "his property" after she retrieved some bulbs from the remains of the garden. The arrest prompted the LESC to hold weekly and very noisy protests right in front of Capoccia's apartment.

Unfortunately, all through this very intense period of attack and counter-attack, several more community gardens have been auctioned to real estate developers. The Rodriguez Community Garden, Jardin de la Esperanza and El Bello Amanecer Borinqueno are still threatened with imminent demolition. Spring 1998 thus finds the Lower East Side garden movement at a critical juncture: If the tide is to be turned, it must be turned now.

Friends: Earth Celebrations/NYC Coalition for the Preservation of the Gardens, 638 East 6th Street, NYC 10009; (212) 777 7969. Lower East Side Collective, 279 E. Houston St., #3C, NYC 10002, (212) 774-4192; http://home.earthlink.net/~aliceme/lesc/lesc.htm.

Foes: HPD, Richard Roberts, (212) 863-6100, fax 267-2565. NYC Housing Partnership, Veronica White, (212) 493-7400, fax 344-3344. Donald Capoccia, (212) 722-3671; fax 534-5021.